Ampersand Organ (a more-than-human lyric)

A fearless, expansive collection that blurs the boundary between body and poem, wielding a liberatory lyric impulse that revels from neuron to nebula and back.

Here is a book of many hearts, a revolutionary tide pool, a mycelial space and sensorium where our neural pathways are “always shared, collective, and entangled.” In this “more-than-human lyric,” heidi andrea restrepo rhodes offers the ampersand, a mode of encounter that unfixes the reader. This form—a lyric prose poem beginning, midsentence, with an ampersand—accesses the intimacies of a life shaped by perpetual “and-ing.” These ampersands move by associative leap, synesthetic braid, and inter-species blur to revel in everything that makes us more than singular subjects. 

Neuroqueering poetics, rhodes writes toward deft and loving excess: spillage, echolalia, stutter, loop, and non-linear detour, refiguring what the lyric can be and what the body can do. These poems revolt against all forms of supremacy, inviting us into unexpected kinship with animal, mineral, vegetal, and heavenly bodies, each replete with its own languages, temporalities, histories, and worlds. 

Tending an everyday eroticism with its “heart at the sleeve, in the palm,” Ampersand Organ is unafraid to feel, to feel again, to feel feeling wherever it’s wildly felt. Here is a radiant, divergent, emergent field guide for how we might all shiver and shimmer into the and and and . . .